I’m a Realtor, and I’ve long since lost count of the number of people who’ve called about seeing a house that weren’t serious at the time. Some of them never did anything, and some of them eventually did. I’d always prefer that people are upfront about it. If you tell me at the start that you don’t think that you’ll be buying right now but want to see a house I have listed, I’ll almost always set an appointment. I might not if it’s a tenant occupied property that’s been hard to show or if it’s owner occupied and the owners have some special showing requirements, and I’ll explain why. But usually I’ll just see it as an opportunity to make a contact that might turn into business. I’ve had some contacts that I’ve stayed in contact with for a few years that eventually did business with me.
I’m a Realtor also and if you called me and said that you didn’t think you were buying a house for another year but you were intrigued by my listing and wanted to see it I would happily show it to you. If you love it and it’s a unique property there’s some chance you’ll change your timeline. I would also hope to keep you as a buyer for the future if nothing worked out with this listing.
Usually a Realtor has to go out to a vacant house once in a while anyway to check on hand-outs or the property condition so I would try to make the trip worthwhile in other ways.
I forgot to mention in my first post - the house I’m living in now? It was WAY outside our price range, we weren’t interested in it, but we wanted to see it. We absolutely weren’t going to buy it. But it just looked so nice, we wanted to see it as a comparison point to some of the other houses we were looking at.
Been here 8 years.
That’s why Realtors don’t mind showing houses to people who aren’t interested in buying.
Any good agent will show you a house whether you are interested in buying it or not. Why? Because we don’t know if you’ll win the lottery or want to buy next year, or have a neighbor who will tell you tomorrow that they want to list their property, etc. etc.
The first rule of real estate is to sell yourself. Everyone needs a place to live, so everyone is a potential customer. Even if you don’t buy the property, refer someone to the agent and mention to them to tell her that you did so.